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Its up to publisher of game to decide, whether its DRM-free or DRMed. What has Valve to do with it?..

Also, Valve has already, for a long time, provided "Reviewer Access" or "Press Access" - that is access to ALL Steam games for reviewers, platform developers, publishers.
It comes very logical why they do that. It is very valuable and will push stability, review count and finally user base.

Fact is Valve's DRM is actually quite agreeable unlike everyone else's. On top of that they are positioned to never go out of buisness, half of all PC game sales are through Steam, which has 75 million active users and they are making a Linux based console to carve out a section of the console market as well.

We're only talking about Valve games here (L4D, Half-Life, CS...), not every game on Steam.

Yet, its their right as a publisher to decide which distribution way they prefer...
I agree it'd be cool to see current free to play games packaged outside of Steam as .deb or similar, but I guess they refuse primary because they use them as an attraction to the Steam platform.

Comment

Its up to publisher of game to decide, whether its DRM-free or DRMed. What has Valve to do with it?..

Also, Valve has already, for a long time, provided "Reviewer Access" or "Press Access" - that is access to ALL Steam games for reviewers, platform developers, publishers.
It comes very logical why they do that. It is very valuable and will push stability, review count and finally user base.

Clearly, this access is NOT for those who seek to just play games.

Um, Valve is both the developer and the publisher. Valve is the company that made and maintains Steam. Therefore, Valve is the publisher of both their own games released through Steam, and the games others publishers/developers sell through Steam. They are very permissive with other developers on how those developers wish to sell their games on their platform. If a developer wishes to sell a game that is DRM-free, they may do so. If they want to sell their game with Steam DRM + Additional DRM (Ubisoft mainly), they are free to do so.

Honestly, DRM-free is nonsense as you lose all the wonderful benefits of Steamworks and revert back to an older, colder era of gaming -- minus the CD keys.